Many older houses aren't well sealed against the weather, especially around the foundation. When the snow falls, a quick once- around the house with a snow blower throwing snow up against the base of the house can cut down on your heating bills.

ILLUSTRATIONS: INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER

Click on the Image Gallery for tips on insulating with snow, composting, planting strawberries and planting vegetables, all excerpted from "The Good Earth Handbook" from International Harvesters, 1976.

When we first launched THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS ® almost seven years ago, we contacted all the large manufacturers of farming equipment in the United States.

"We're going to publish a magazine devoted to the back-to-the- land movement," we said, "and we'd like to know about anything you market that a subsistence or part-time farmer might be able to use."

"Get lost," we were told. "There's no back-to-the-land movement in this country. We're phasing out all our little stuff in favor of bigger equipment. Go away. You bother us."

It certainly brightened our day, then, when we recently received notice from the public relations department of International Harvester of the availability of a 16 page, full-color catalog/brochure entitled The Good Earth Handbook.

Now this little booklet, as might be expected, is basically designed to sell IN lawn mowers, garden tractors, roto tillers, hedge trimmers, shredder/grinders, and related equipment. But it's interesting (at least to us) to note the manner in which International Harvester has chosen to promote this gear: With tips about controlling pests without using pesticides. With instructions for making compost. With recipes for down-home dandelion wine. With—in short—the very kind of do-it-yourself, live-in-harmony-with-the-planet information that all the big farm machinery manufacturers told us would never sell just a few years ago.

Which makes us very happy, in at least two ways: [1] we're pleased to see IH beginning to develop a line of small-scale farming and gardening tools expressly for the self-sufficient homestead and [2] it's nice to know that at least one of the "biggies" is beginning to take us back-to-the-landers seriously enough to attempt to speak "'our language".